Ditch PowerPoint For Google Presentations

Love PowerPoint or hate it, the bottom line is that most presentations need to be accompanied by a visual display, preferably with choice graphics, charts and styled data. With the newly enhanced Google presentations, you can now ditch the rather expensive and memory hogging Microsoft Office product.

Although PowerPoint now has a web app for online access to files, the less than creatively named Google presentations is built for the clouds from the ground up. And we’re increasingly all about the cloud.

Until now, Google presentations offered a very pared down interface and slides with limited functionality. No more. After spending the past year enhancing Email, Docs and Spreadsheets, Google recently released a new version of presentations with faster collaboration and great new features.

Awesome new and enhanced features include:

Transitions – Among the welcome and long overdue features is transitions — the animation-like effects that occur when moving from one slide to the next, from simple fades to 3-D effects.

Collaboration – So many of our projects are collaborative and Google has made it incredibly easy to create and work together on a presentation. After rolling out collaboration features in Docs and Spreadsheets, Google now brings this functionality to presentations. See what others are working on in real time, with a colorful presence marker for each user. Team members can edit live and simultaneously from remote locations. A revision history is available to see who made changes or to revert to prior versions. Rounding out this impressive feature is a live chat box to share ideas as you collectively work on presentations.

New themes – Though not as significant as the other two, the new themes are a vast improvement over the scant few, rather uninspired options that were previously available.

These are just three great features of the new Google presentation. The more than 50 new features also include enhanced animations, the ability to build new designs and flowcharts within a presentation, and improved tables functionality to beautify your data.

The auto-save feature available in all Google products removes the fear of losing information that you just entered. Since it’s saved in the cloud, it also means that your presentation is available to anyone at any time at any location.

The new and enhanced features are gradually being rolled out to users. So if you’re a lawyer preparing to give a CLE, law student toiling over a project or marketing department putting together a proposal, forget about purchasing PowerPoint and give the free Google presentations a try.

Hey Morgan, I haven’t used Keynote much but have a colleague who does and it’s terrific and the results are spectacular. Not sure if it has the collaborative/sharing features, ease of converting (saving) to other formats, and the auto-saving to the cloud that Google Presentations has. Perhaps someone else can weigh in?